in u.s. military operations? guest: special operations forces have played an increasing role over the last decade, since they are designed to confront a regular presence of a wide variety, not only terrorism but insurgency, countering weapons of mass destruction and so forth, so they have a very wide mission. they have also grown greatly in the last decade. they are partly a number of about 33,000 uniformed badged special operations forces and they come from the navy, marines, army, air force. host: in terms of the budget, over the last decade, it was to $0.5 billion in 2001 during now it is in excess of $10.5 billion today. guest: that's right. the budget has almost quintupled. a great deal of that has also gone to the high end -- both the expansion and personnel, because people do cost money, the training and salaries for them, but also to a lot of this has gone to the high end special mission units and equipping them with state-of- the-art communications, stealth helicopters, a number of state of the art commands interest, also, the special operations command down in tampa, bef
